Books
A grand tour of the globe
When the wealthy young Joseph Banks announced that he intended joining Captain Cook’s expedition to Tahiti to observe the Transit…
Making a killing
What happened in the rites of Eleusis is a mystery. So are all the unwritten parts of human history. Our…
Cricket’s Faustian pact
Imagine an archetypal English scene and it’s likely you’re picturing somewhere rural. Despite losing fields and fields each year to…
How far should we go?
Modern advances in communication technology, computer power and medical science can sometimes be so startling as to seem almost like…
The poet of self-discovery
To describe a new book as ‘eagerly awaited’ is almost unpardonable. Yet Mark Doty’s What is the Grass: Walt Whitman…
Swan song
This is Roger Scruton’s final book. Parsifal was Wagner’s final opera. Both works are intended to be taken as Last…
Nature fights back
Adrian Woolfson explains the essence of pandemics – and how we can expect many more of them
Killing for a cup of coffee
In the winter of 1939, at the San Francisco Golden Gate trade fair, an advertorial film called Behind the Cup…
A tinpot Caesar
Mussolini dreamed of a new Roman empire and dominion over the Mediterranean. Two decades later he was hanging by his feet in a public square, as Ian Thomson relates
Sadness and scandal
In 1886 the British mathematician and schoolmaster Charles Howard Hinton presented himself to the police at Bow Street, London to…
Flower power
Critics have argued over the meaning of the great golden flower head to which Van Dyck points in his ‘Self-Portrait…
A rude awakening
Some accounts of moving to the countryside are aspirational and inspiring, but this book is more of a ‘how not…
High on speed
I have driven a racing car. On television, it looks like a smooth and scientific matter. It is not. A…
Being Woody Allen
It’s been tough recently being Woody Allen, something that didn’t look too easy to begin with. Last year Amazon breached…
The music deafens
People often say that the battle for male gay rights has been won, at least in the West, and that…
Tyrants at table
Private chefs keep many secrets and are expected to go to their graves without sharing a morsel of gossip about…
The perfect stranger
This novella is suited to our fevered times. Scheduled to coincide with the Swindon spring festival of literature, now cancelled,…
Surprises in store
In these circumstances there’s a temptation to reach for the longest novel imaginable. If you’re not going to read Proust…
A smaller man
Never trust a person who keeps a diary. After all, who keeps a diary other than someone who wants subsequently…
Stepmothers, and other bad apples
Fairy stories were not originally aimed at children, and we do not know what the first audience responses were; but…
The inner circle from hell
Putin’s corrupt cronies may change, but the paranoid world view they all share remains the same, says Owen Matthews
Tales of Jolly Jack Tar
Seafaring and the rule of the waves — as the song would have it — was an integral part of…
Deepest, darkest desires
In Henry and June, Anaïs Nin asks her cousin Eduardo if one can be freed of a desire by experiencing…
The infamous five
Between October 2013 and January 2014, five teenaged boys from Brighton, three of them brothers from a family called Deghayes,…
The sky’s the limit
‘The world,’ Mrs Thatcher was reported to have said, ‘is full of ships.’ With this comment, unlike in many other…
